Your Story’s Promise: Do You Need an Epilogue?
Given reviews about too-abrupt endings, readers might want a sense of closure beyond what authors deliver. Should we use epilogues—or epilogue-like endings—to breach the gap?
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Where Normal Need Not Apply
Given reviews about too-abrupt endings, readers might want a sense of closure beyond what authors deliver. Should we use epilogues—or epilogue-like endings—to breach the gap?
Pin ItWe often talk about the pros and cons of prologues, but epilogues can be good or bad as well. Let’s look at how epilogues differ from normal endings, what they can do, and what they shouldn’t do.
Pin ItUnless we’re only ever going to write just one book, we need to improve our ability to develop an idea into a story. That means we need to learn how to brainstorm in a productive way.
Pin ItTo make NaNo work for us, we need to figure out our goals for the experience—and there’s no wrong answer. However, if our goal is to create a coherent story, we should try to understand story structure.
Pin ItAs a writer we can suffer from the impostor syndrome, feeling like a newbie many times over. But we all have expertise in something, and now’s your chance to help others and share what you know.
Pin ItA truly broken story is one where the pieces of the story don’t come together in a coherent whole. But if we’re willing to put in the work, virtually any story can be saved. Then question then is: What steps should we take to fix a broken story?
Pin ItJust as we have go-to favorite authors that we know we can depend on for delivering a certain type of story, readers are evaluating us for what we can deliver: What’s our promise to readers when they pick up one of our stories?
Pin ItAfter we finish brainstorming and start trying to assemble our ideas into a story, that’s the perfect point in our writing process to avoid major problems by questioning what story issues we might run into before we write too many words.
Pin ItPart of being an author is finding and marketing our book to readers who will love our story. If we think like a business person, we can see how the launching of a new book has many similarities to how businesses launch a new product.
Pin ItWe often have more ideas for stories than we actually write, and somehow, we choose and prioritize. Why might we not write a story idea that we’re passionate about—and is there anything we can do to overcome those reasons?
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